When I was an undergraduate at Georgia Tech, I went to two presentations made by Honda and its semi-autonomous robot Asimo in 2004.
If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that I am interested in robots. I own a Robie Sr. and I enjoy building simple robots with Lego. At the time when I made this video, I was gobsmacked by Asimo’s capabilities. I thought to myself that it seemed far more social and practical than R2-D2.
The video below is from the second presentation that I attended. I sat in the front row with my friend’s Sony camcorder to capture the action taking place on stage in the Ferst Center for the Arts where the presentations took place. Later, I edited the video and burned a DVD of it with my PowerMac G5. Today, I ripped the DVD with HandBrake and uploaded it to YouTube as an MP4 video file. Now, the video exists online:
Mavericks installed on CustoMac. NB: MBPr on desk and PowerMacintosh 8500/120 on right.
Last summer, I wrote about my experiences installing Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion on my Asus P8Z77-V and Intel i7-2700K PC here. What I neglected to say at the time was that an alarming number of creeping instabilities led me to ultimately abandon running Mountain Lion on my PC and return to Windows 7.
I later learned that some of these instabilities were likely linked to a bad PSU and video card–both of which were replaced by the manufacturers under warranty (awesome kudos to Antec and EVGA). With the new PSU and video card, my PC returned to 100% stability under Windows 7. This made me wonder if I could try rolling out a Mavericks installation on my PC.
Also, I wanted to use Mac OS X’s superior file content search technology and other third-party textual analysis tools in my research. I have a MacBook Pro 15″ retina (MBPr), but it lacks the hard drive capacity for my accumulated research files. The comfort that I feel in the MacOS environment and the need for lots of fast storage led me to turn my attention back to turning my PC into a CustoMac (aka “hackintosh”).
This time, I wanted to streamline and simply my setup as much as possible and incorporate components that should work out of the box (OOB). Toward this end, I reduced my hardware configuration from this:
ASUS P8Z77-V LGA 1155 Z77 ATX Intel Motherboard (disabled on-board Intel HD 3000 video and Asus Wi-Fi Go! add-on card)
evga 01G-P3-1561-KR GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1024MB GDDR5 PCIe 2.0 x16 Video Card (removed to simply setup and save power–who has time for gaming?)
Antec High Current Gamer 750W Gamer Power Supply HCG-750
Corsair Vengeance C70 Gaming Mid Tower Case Military Green
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus Universal CPU Cooler
Samsung 22X DVD±RW Burner with Dual Layer Support – OEM
Intel 128 GB SATA SSD
Three Western Digital HDDs for file storage and work space.
IoGear GBU521 and TP-Link TL-WDN4800 from Microcenter.
Also, I added two new components that were recommended from the TonyMacx86 Forums:
TP-Link 450Mbpx Wireless N Dual Band PCI Express Adapter (TL-WDN4800). It works in Mavericks OOB.
IoGear Bluetooth 4.0 USB Micro Adapter (GBU521). It works in Mavericks OOB.
ASUS’s Wi-Fi Go! card works great in Windows 7, but it caused problems with my Mavericks installation.
As noted above, I physically removed my 560 Ti video card, because I wanted to simply my setup for installation purposes. Also, I removed the ASUS Wi-Fi Go! add-on card, because despite disabling it in BIOS, the Mavericks installer seemed to hang on a wi-fi device while attempting to set its locale (a setting that determines what radio settings to use based on the country that you happen to be in). After I removed the Wi-Fi Go! card, I had a nearly flawless Mavericks installation process (NB: removing the Wi-Fi Go! card required removing the motherboard, turning it over, removing a screw holding in the Wi-Fi Go! card, turning the motherboard over, and unplugging the Wi-Fi Go! card).
These are the steps that I used to install Mavericks on my PC:
Following installation of Mavericks, boot from your USB drive, select your new Mavericks installation drive, arrive at the desktop, and run Multibeast.
Select these settings in Multibeast:
Quick Start > DSDT Free (I left all pre-selected options as-is. Below are additional selections that I made.)
Drivers > Audio > Realtek > Without DSDT > ALC892
Drivers > Disk > 3rd Party SATA
Drivers > Graphics > Intel Graphics Patch for Mixed Configurations
Drivers > Misc > Fake SMC
Drivers > Misc > Fake SMC Plugins
Drivers > Misc > Fake SMC HWMonitor App
Drivers > Misc > NullCPUPowerManagement (I don’t want my machine to go to sleep)
In order to arrive at the above instructions, I read a lot of first hand experiences and third party suggestions on TonyMac’s forums. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the amazing community of CustoMac builders who take the time to share their thoughts and lessons and equally so to the tool-builders who create amazing software including UniBeast, Multibeast, and Chameleon Wizard!
I would suggest that you remember that there is not always one path to a successful build. I distilled a lot of posts into my successful build. Your experience with similar hardware might take a different path. Reading others experiences and trying their suggestions experimentally can lead to your own successful discoveries. Thus, I took the time to try out different configurations of hardware until settling on the stripped down approach with on-board video and OOB networking gear. I tried several different installations: a failed Mavericks installation with kernel panics (Wi-Fi Go! card installed and wrong Multibeast configuration), a successful Mountain Lion installation (barebones and correct Multibeast configuration), and a successful Mavericks installation (detailed above).
Obviously, MacOS X can run on a wide range of PC hardware given the correct drivers, configuration information, etc. Apple could do great things if only Tim Cook and others would think differently and move beyond the tightly integrated hardware-software experience. Apple’s engineers could do great things with building better operating systems that adapt to a person’s hardware. Given the chance, they could challenge Microsoft and Google with a new MacOS X that is insanely great for everyone–not just those who can afford to buy new hardware.
Now, back to using some of the tools that I use in my research on a computing platform that I enjoy:
Our computers and other computing devices store some of our most important belongings: photos, videos, music, syllabi, research, and manuscripts. We owe it to ourselves to maintain and protect these things through best practices in computer maintenance, security, backups, and training. During the upcoming winter break, I would like to encourage everyone to spend some time putting your cyber-house in order before the spring semester begins.
To help you with this and to promote best practices, I will hold a workshop in DevLab on Wednesday, Dec. 4 from 4:00-5:00PM before D-Ped. Workshop participants are encouraged to bring their Mac or PC to the meeting. Tablets are also welcome.
If you have a question for the workshop that I cannot answer off the top of my head, we can use the workshop as an opportunity to learn something new together.
This year, Georgia Tech’s Writing and Communication Program and its Brittain Fellows had a strong presence at the annual South Atlantic Modern Language Association meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.
I presented a poster on the program’s R&D unit, DevLab. To compose the poster, I took a panoramic photo of DevLab’s main space (we also have an external recording booth). My students and fellow Brittain Fellows are pictured doing work and collaborating at various events over the past few months.
Standing next to my poster in the Buckhead Marriott.
We also had posters on the Communication Center, our pedagogical research, and our scholarly research. Here’s a list of all posters from the official program:
10. Georgia Institute of Technology Brittain Fellowship,
Poster Series I
The Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Georgia Institute of Technology
a. Jason Ellis, DevLab: Research and Development Lab Facility
b. CommLab: Tutoring Center for Multimodal Communication
11. Georgia Institute of Technology Brittain Fellowship, Poster Series II
WOVEN: Multimodal Communication in the Classroom
a. Joy Bracewell
b. Jennifer Lux
c. Julia Munro
12. Georgia Institute of Technology Brittain Fellowship, Poster Series III
Intersections between Scholarship and Pedagogy
a. Aaron Kashtan
b. Jennifer Orth-Veillon
c. Aron Pease
13. Georgia Institute of Technology Brittain Fellowship, Poster Series IV
Changing Higher Education
a. Mirja Lobnik, World Englishes Committee
b. Multiple Presenters, Curriculum Innovation Committee
c. Arts Initiatives Committee
Besides participating in the poster session, I also took notes from N. Katherine Hayles’ plenary lecture on Friday afternoon. I will post my notes from that talk here soon.
Next year, I will propose a paper for SAMLA and hopefully present an updated version of the DevLab poster. See you there!
We met with an audience of about 25 members of the Georgia Tech community in the Stephen C. Hall Building, Room 102 from 11:00am-12:00pm.
My research in the area
My interest in eBooks comes from two tangents.
First, it comes from my research interests in video game narratives in older software for the Commodore 64, Amiga, IBM-PC, Apple II, and Apple Macintosh platforms. Part of this research focuses on the way characters read within the game—particularly, computer based reading on terminals, tablets, virtual displays, etc. and how these ideas filter into reality/production and vice versa.
Second, it comes from my dissertation research on something that William Gibson wrote about obsolescence and how our technologies—typewriters, Apple IIc, etc.—are fated to become junk littering the Finn’s office—in an “Afterword” to his Sprawl trilogy of novels: Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive [To read it, scroll to the bottom of this page]. The trouble with sourcing this text was the fact that it was not published in a physical book. Instead, I discovered from a Tweet that a mutual friend made with the writer that it come from an early eBook designed for the Apple Macintosh Portable by Voyager Company (what’s left of this company today creates the Criterion Collection of films).
Gibson, William. “Afterword.” Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive: Expanded Books. Voyager Company. 1992. TXT File. Web. 25 March 2012.
Gibson has done other things with ebook and experimental writing such as his exorbitantly priced Agrippa: A Book of the Dead, a floppy disk based e-poem that erases itself after “performing” one time.
Since working with Gibson’s ebook, I’ve begun studying other ebooks—rediscovering ones that I read a long time ago and rethinking what constitutes an ebook—thinking about encyclopedia precursors to Wikipedia and other software such as the Star Trek: TNG Interactive Technical Manual, which does on the computer things that Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda could not do in their print Technical Manual.
We can talk more about this later, but I support Aaron Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.” In my research, I have deployed my own tactics for reading and manipulating text that enable scholarship that I otherwise would be unable to do. Read more about fair use and transformation.
DPLA scans of Dickinson’s manuscripts (open) and copyrighted scholarly editions (closed).
Issues of the Archive, Access, and Control.
My suggestions for future research directions
The relationship between haptic experience of pulp books and ebooks (e-reader, tablet, computer, Google Glass, etc.). How do we read, think about, and remember books differently based on the modalities of experiencing the book? We know that the brain constructs memories as simulations, so what are we gaining and losing through alterations to the methods of interacting with writing?
How are our students reading? More students this year than last asked me if they could purchase their books for ENGL1101 and Tech Comm as ebooks. How many students are turning to ebooks due to their cost or ease of access (pirating)? I don’t mind students purchasing ebooks over traditional books, but I have them think about the affordances of each.
As researchers, how should we assert our fair use of texts despite the intentions of copyright holders? We no longer own books, but instead, we license content. [Purgathofer mentions this, but Cory Doctorow and others have commented on this at length: one source.Another more recent source.]
Jay Bolter: What about the future of books, the status of the book, and the status of libraries? What will happen to literature and the literary community? What is the cultural significances of print/digital to different communities (e.g., general community of readers vs. community represented by the New York Review of Books)?
Lauren Klein: What are the roles of the archive and how do readers access information in the archive? We should think about how people use these digital archives (e.g., DPLA). In her work, she deploys computational linguistics: techniques to study sophisticated connections between documents. How is the information being used? Deploying visualization techniques to enable new ways of seeing, reading, and studying documents.
Grantley Bailey: What about people who grow up only reading on screens/ebooks? What will their opinions be regarding this debate?
Aaron Kashtan: Commented about graphic novels and comics in the digital age and about how these media remain entrenched in traditional, print publishing. Also, Aaron is interested in materiality and the reader’s experience.
John Harkey: Commented on poetry’s dynamism and its not being wedded to books/chap books. Poetry is evolving and thriving through a variety of media including the Web, as electronic art, and experimental literature. We should think about literature as vehicles of genres and artifactual heterogeneity (essay, collage, posters, augmented reality, etc.).
Lisa Yaszek: Pan-African science fiction is likely a model for the future. In the present, no single nation can support a thriving publishing industry for SF, but together, African SF is taking off with the diffusion of new technologies of distribution and reading (ubiquity of cellular phones, wifi, cellular data, etc.).
